Want to Be a Good Drummer?

Monday, February 1st, 2016

Being a good drummer is more than a hobby. It’s a lifestyle and one that must take lots of diligence and commitment to succeed at. However, the payout is immense. Once you have learned to play drums successfully, it can be one of the fulfilling things that someone could do in their life.

There’s definitely a difference between a drummer who plays for his lifestyle and one who plays as his hobby. The huge difference is practice habits and attitude. Having commitment and self-control to practice regularly is one way to improve as a drummer. There are several tips on how to be a good drummer and these are as follows:

Make Time to Play and to Practice
One of the largest errors a drummer may make is to fail making time for practice and to jam. There’s a difference here. Practice is an opportunity to work on your drumming beats, stick control, skills, and some techniques that you like to learn. Jam time is more like the time to do your newly learned skills to real applications. Majority of drummers allot a time to jam or practice and end up playing to several bands. But, this isn’t a bad thing. Just make sure to have focused practice time alone for you to improve your drumming skills effectively.

Use Practice Pads
It’s an obvious tip when practicing how to play for drums, yet it goes a bit deeper than that. Once you practice, you must spend half of your time to practice on full drum set. The other half of your time is on practice pads. It’s something that majority of drummers know to do, yet some rarely do this. The benefit of using practice pads is you’re forced to develop stick control. A good starter practice pad that is relatively cheap, and one example to use is the Vic Firth 12″ Double sided Practice Pad . Once you play on full drum set, you have tons of distractions in front of you, which make it easy for you to play and focus on a single technique.

Set Goals for Every Practice Session
One tip majority of drummers fail to do is to set goals for practice sessions. This doesn’t need to be unreasonable goal, just a basic reachable goal. Make it sensible and challenging at the same time. The reason behind this is that you’re more focused on the time you’re practicing. If you will practice without goals, you’ll have no drive to learn anything.

Surround Yourself with Challenging Music
When drumming, it would be a good idea to surround yourself with challenging music. If you like to learn how to play double pass drum, surround yourself in music, which incorporates double bass drum. When you’re constantly listening to advanced beats as well as odd time signatures you’re sub-consciously implementing this into your brain. Also, you’ll be challenged much more and be creative.

By following those tips above, you can be assured that you will be one of the best drummers out there. Just make sure to have fun no matter what you want to aim when practicing.